Hue-preserving color image enhancement without gamut problem.

The first step in many techniques for processing intensity and saturation in color images keeping hue unaltered is the transformation of the image data from RGB space to other color spaces such as LHS, HSI, YIQ, HSV, etc. Transforming from one space to another and processing in these spaces usually generate a gamut problem, i.e., the values of the variables may not be in their respective intervals. We study enhancement techniques for color images theoretically in a generalized setup. A principle is suggested to make the transformations gamut-problem free. Using the same principle, a class of hue-preserving, contrast-enhancing transformations is proposed; they generalize existing grey scale contrast intensification techniques to color images. These transformations are also seen to bypass the above mentioned color coordinate transformations for image enhancement. The developed principle is used to generalize the histogram equalization scheme for grey scale images to color images.